Welcome to the Making African Connections Digital Archive. To begin your exploration of the Archive, enter a search term above or browse the Archive.

The Making African Connections project ran between 2019 and 2021. It researched historic African collections held in Sussex and Kent museums with the aim of furthering both conceptual and applied debates over ‘decolonizing’ public institutions. A key strand of the project involved researching and digitizing around 600 objects from three specific Africa colonial-era collections:

  1. C19th century objects from Botswana held in Brighton Museum from the collection of Rev. Willoughby and other sources;
  2. C19th century objects from Sudan, collected in the context of the wars against the Mahdist forces, held at the Royal Engineers Museum, Library and Archive;
  3. 1930s objects from the Namibia/Angola borderlands held at the Powell-Cotton Museum.

The Making African Connections Digital Archive is now dormant, with no updates planned, and is maintained by Southampton Digital Humanities and the Powell-Cotton Museum. For more information about the project, see the About page.